Scott joined Apr 29, 2002

I am the founder of DBolical and creator of ModDB, IndieDB and SlideDB. My aim is to make it easier for gamers to find great games/mods no matter their stage of development. And more importantly give game/mod developers a place to share their work and grow their fanbase - without being dependent on press/editors gatekeeping the important news sites.
If you have any ideas or suggestions, hit me up I am always available to talk with the community.

Played the review copy you gave desura / indiedb. holy s**t was it amazing. so much fun, though I sucked so hard at been the hero (was a great monster thou). Somehow need to make it so that if you become a hero after all the monsters have powered up you have a fighting chance perhaps.

That will never happen. Ads can be worthwhile if done right, the minute you overdo them they go from been valuable to downright annoying. We only want quality not quantity. On mod profiles we typically only run one ad on the sidebar, sometimes two.

Oh and as a member we instantly show you less ads, our thanks for participating in the community. No ads if you use Desura.

we planned it from the start, and it literally didn't take long at all to get desura cross-compiling. getting it actually functional and working out the quirks is the hard bit as Kame rightfully points out

First of all we haven't been contacted by jack thompson. we have however been contacted by concerned parents, relatives and those that went to these schools.

We have 12,000+ mods listed in the database, and in 8 years this is the only 1 that has ever caused such controversy. So no we wont be removing any others. We have attempted to contact this team to discuss their mod, their aims and have received no response.

I'm willing to admit if we've made a mistake, so if a creator of this mod wants to get in touch I encourage them too.

It is a really difficult solution because we are rooting for the little guy here. It is why we want to provide feedback

...however do you have an iPhone for example? I find it crazy that they brag about having hundreds and thousands of apps and yet only 50 apps in the top charts get any coverage.

As a developer who spent ages working on perfecting an app - i'd find it annoying to have my app drowned in a sea of duplicates.

As a user I find it frustrating that when I want an app that does X there are hundreds of matches, the majority of which are quickly built. I know there is a good app in there, but finding it is a real challenge. Many times now i've brought an app with great reviews and description only to discover it isn't as good as another app a friend recommends a week later. It isn't a user experience I enjoy.

So if two developers have created games targeting the same users, but one developer has spent time making nice cut scenes and perfecting the game - have they not earned the right to be prioritized?

Having said this the fact that our system supports comments, user-reviews, news, dynamic galleries the better content should automatically rise to the top via community support.

Oh its a great question and one i'm happy to answer. The difference between the copy of the game we offer and a hardcopy is that the hardcopy you receive once and that's it. If you break it or lose it it's gone. Kind of like how Apple "sell" you stuff so you own it, but if you delete or lose it too bad.

In our situation however we hopefully enable you to download this content as many times as you want on any devices you own. Because we enable this the publishers of games view us as providing a service, which they can revoke. Of course in our agreement with them even if they revoke we will argue that existing customers can still get their game anytime they want but it is their for legal reasons. The major problem with this clause and say Steam, is because your game is tied to your account if Steam decide to disable it, its gone - you cannot play it anymore. On Desura we make this optional and we hope that most publishers will opt for a DRM free copy (even Desura free copy) which works with or without Desura. Not every game will do this, but i'd say 99% of indies will and we will brand profiles that are "DRM" free.

I know this doesn't quite answer your question and all of your concerns, digital law and ownership is really a tricky thing since their is no "physical product" just copies, hence why licensing is the more popular legal enforcement method.

I'm afraid that Steam has set the trend here and we have no option but to cover ourselves with this right.

You see the problem is we release game X. 2 years later game X tells us they don't want to work together anymore and revoke the game. Whilst in our agreement with game X we say you must allow your existing customers to be able to own and play your game, they may dispute this in court and win. In this case we have no other option.

Having said this unlike steam which must be running for your game to run, Desura does not enforce this (it is up to game developers to choose if they want to integrate with our API) so any game you have installed shall continue to work, with or without Desura.

You have to remember that in 6 years of steam they have never revoked any game (i'm assuming this) and nor do they ever intend to. I'm not defending the clause because I dont agree with it either, i'm just saying it is a legal necessity. If you look at android, itunes or anywhere else you will find the same written.

It is a very fine line. Free, fan made projects so far we have found are supported and fine, we have had no issues in 7 years. What we want to make clear however, is that if you use content / ip by another and they do not wish you to, it will be removed immediately should the creator request it be.

Avoid possible issues by always making your own work and ideas reality, its more creative, more challenging, more rewarding and more fun.

The Javascript WYSIWYG editor is a nightmare I know this, but it is such a complicated beast it is hard to tame. I will look into this for you and see if I can make the system any better via a much needed update.

The Air Force and Navy have always been huge supporters of the MOTY. The amount of tech it takes to run the planes, satelites, spy gear etc is astounding and well they see you guys as the best. After all game development is incredibly difficult - don't think anyone can argue with me there.

We are happy to have them on board and hope they continue to support the awards in '09 and beyond.

Had major issues with our web7 box for about 6 hours (causing the slowness mentioned above).

We tried about a hundred fixes and nothing worked, but now the issue (segfaults) appears to have mysterously dissapeared. So please if the site seems slower to you after the upgrade (it shouldn't, it should be same speed or faster) - PLEASE post a comment here.

See the embed code on the right hand menu? Copy that embed code and add it where you want your music by clicking the YOUTUBE button in some textareas. The forums, profile descriptions and other fields support this HTML, comments don't.

This was the approach we had originally planned, however when picking and choosing "best graphics, originality" we found the same candidates kept popping up. The problem we saw with this approach which we didn't anticipate during planning, is that it really limited the mods we could pick and meant many creative deserving titles we wanted to pick missed out. Plus having good graphics, audio, physics etc doesn't necessarily equate to a good mod. We want well rounded mods which are the total package, not a mod which excels at audio but not much else. Finally it saps a little excitement out of the awards when say the mod with best graphics was picked because it has uhh... best graphics?!?

These days a common complaint is that games lack originality (sequel anyone!?) and focus too much on the graphics and not the gameplay. We wanted to show that mods do amazing and different things, hence the switch.

We don't necessarily have this luxary because we need fresh news constantly ticking over. No point wait 2 days between good posts.

I really don't understand why some modders spend 2 minutes on a news article which will go infront of moddb's 50,000+ daily audience. you think they would spend a little time on it considering how important such promotion is!

it troubled me to add HL2 for example before release. I agree with you guys, at best you could plan out your gameplay, do minor visual and concept work but thats it. Considering such 'boring development' work is normally never tackled by modding teams that just want to make the mod, nothing more i reckon it is silly to begin making a mod for a game not released.

So yeah it was added due to the protests i recieved and yes they did total a few per day!

No it isn't me, and their posting ability is really restricted.. this is obviously someone trying to make a point... i dunno, it can easily be disabled, but they can only post at POLLS / NEWS and FEATURES, no where else, limiting any damage that can be done

Tis true, which is why i choose multiplayer only :D you guys are all loners, gotta play against other people or is it just cos of your net connection. I have had broadband for a few years now so i can hardly remeber the pain of slowness :D

too true that... but i mean so bright and colorful it is irresistable and well even the items and stuff theme in perfectly with this mod.. fantastic all round job thus far, keep the updates flowing in :D

A well deserved award, as I know this mod team comprises of only a few all of whom have put there heart and sole into this mod. Looks to have really paid off, and boy i really do hope it makes it to the release stage..

in the mean time, i'll just keep on staring at those fine promo images! :o

looks, great and sounds great - congrats team shall be interesting to see how it goes once the mainstream public is unleashed :)

oh and about your mods rating, some lamer, must be fixing it... i have talked with sluggo, and i am busy working on the forums now, however in about 1 week all votes will be logged and 'fixing' will be hopefully eliminated so yeah - i'll fix your problem theb, hope thats cool! :paranoid:

iG wrote:you should only give em out monthly, that way people will respect them

if you hand em out like chips, nobody will really care

thats what mod of the month is for.. and yeah the aim is really to have the awards as an elusive honor... every week sounds pretty nice, i mean it will remain elusive because there are like 10 different award types to go around to 200+ different mods, so thats like 2000 awards which means to give em all out it would take 40years, so it is elusive :P

i am really tempted to try out commenting by anyone however then that will most definatly encourage some mofos to just post negative stuff...

if it were to be implemented all IPs would be logged and administrators would definatly be given the ability to delete comments - as to extending that functionality to include mod leaders deleteing comments about their own mod.. i shall have to consider it.. i dunno i am really tempted to give this a run but so far the consensous is no

I am 100% with you. CS had a popular run for some time but DoD is without a doubt one of the most played mods made without commerical interests at heart (well at least initally) and that is just one of the many mods.

Plus the engine is just so versitile - Natural Selection, Buzzybots, HL Rally are just a few mods which are testimony to that...

ForKmaN wrote:3rd comment, but the link dont work, when i click it, its a 404, so you got the HTML wrong :/

That is now fixed, thanks for pointing that out!!!

everyone wrote:I need an icon for the game '<i>blah blah blah'</i>

Soz I didn't make that clear in the original news post.. every game has a new icon. It can be found in the topsite/topmods profile to use and also in the actual games profile...

everyone wrote:I dun like the game icon for my game

I'll be trying to polish a few up but it is hard to be creative for every single game :P Oh and forky what do you mean the serioussam one aint look cool!? That is my second favourite one... the Red Faction icon is my favourite thou...

Worms does work a real treat. I remember the first time i played worms 2 with the big fat cartoonish worms.... At first I thought it was a lil ghey, but it is gameplay that rocks and well i got used to and feel in love with the cartoonish graphics

lixus wrote:hey, you seem to forget creativity, or do you want to see another six thousand realism cs-like mods..? my vote is creativity

100% with you mate!! Nothing is more depressing than a mod which is basically reguritating another mods ideas and generally making them worse. Thats kinda why gameplay cannot really lose cos essentially good gameplay is brought about by a twist on the normal way of doing something - which is just another way of saying creativity.

ok, before you all trip out - i decided to update my avatar!! the new one, was done using a picture of meh, which was then maniped a little in photoshop by a good mate of mine, howling!! Finially i made it into avatar sized and uploaded.. enjoy!

also the image in my profile is no longer meh dog, but the view from the 28th floor of the IBM building where i worked for 5 months...

So many mods / games are turning to this cell rendering / cartoon feel and I gotta say, when done well it looks fantastic and from the looks of things your mod is really on the right track. Fine job mate, love the teaser pic - keep it coming :wub: !!!!

Great logo, thanks for the submission and mod looks fantabulos!! Shame there aint more people working on the SS engine, because it really does work an absolute treat as is proven by this mod, and various others such as GB :thumbup:

how can one possibly get bored of just killing everything eheh :) I guess it is a lil unfair having gameplay in the mix, cos it'll obviously win, because good gameplay is basically created through a culmination of good maps, good models, good pixie fairy's, AI etc... so it is prolly to broada term to include in this poll

I am a testz0r.. damn gotta thank you lads for letting me in on this mod..

from what I have heard, it sounds like nothing I will have played. The AI will rock I just hope for my own prides sake that I can actually beat the AI. Cannot have them flanking me time to practice :de: :D !!!

Ok, without a doubt the key to a mod has gotta be gameplay. I say this ignorantly however, because usually what attracts me to scope out a mod is its visuals. Visuals can however easily be enhanced where-as gameplay cannot, I mean sorry to bring in CS :flame: but since v4.0 or so when it established itself as pretty much what it is now, despite many additions to improve gameplay honestly has anything really changed? :?

Gameplay is what keeps you coming back for more, it it is fun, you'll play it.. I mean people still play HL DM and it looks horrible when compared with some of the other offerings. So yeah, I love a big motha GUN, to wield :devious: but that is only initial excitement, it is gameplay that carries a mod!

Appreciate your support whether you subscribe or not. I do notice that some ads are quite resource intensive. We always strive for quality ads, and I will always try and stop those that are slow, loud or obnoxious

Bah our upload system is better than Youtubes. Just make sure you attempt to upload the original high quality video before reverting to Youtube. As youtube reencodes the videos and they do loose a bit of definition, even when in HD mode.

It is only for the last few minutes, but very handy for tracking an explosion of visitors. For example we ran a witcher competition a month ago, but last week it just exploded in popularity. If you goto the stats log: Moddb.com

You can see that the competition was mentioned on the official witcher blog, hence the visitors.

I think it is brilliant that Minecraft is doing so well, but at the same time it pains me that whilst one indie developer is setup for the rest of his life another 100 making equally as complex and possibly good games (ok not as viral) are in a daily battle to make ends meet.

They share the same backend so you don't need to. Remember ModDB isn't changing, so if you like ModDB stick with it and content posted on IndieDB will continue to be shown on it. Also Desura is a distribution platform for released games and mods. It is more about "playing" while IndieDB and ModDB are more about "developing" and interaction between developers and fans.

Previous spamming will be bannable, I have checked the logs and noticed a number of members who should be banned. At the moment I have banned the 3 worst, but will consider banning the rest if they are reported to me.

Totally separate, where the mods is more of an "awards show" with prizes and community voting, this is a showcase of the best from the first 6 months of the year. Mainly because so many damn good gameplay experiences have been released, and we want to give you a taste of all of them. That and look behind the scenes with exclusive and great content.

The only "prize" to be had here, is heaps of coverage for the teams on the homepage, in this profile and on the wider internet... so yeah please blog and mention when it launches: Moddb.com

None really, it worked just didn't load balance so it was hard to manage. Also this one smartly picks the best mirror for you, and if a mirror isn't working it automatically removes it until it works again.

There are still a few bugs due to the different browsers, but this should hopefully allow us to roll out more and faster mirrors and get the support from ISPs.

Thanks for the offer, but unless you actually have a solid dedicated server / pipe it won't work. Many people think "dreamhost" for example can host these files, since their plans are essentially "unlimited". But they cap / throttle and do many other things that the end users speed is pretty poor the more you push it.

I didn't make my point clear enough, I'm just saying its good that abitary gameplay concepts devised 20 years ago (i.e. health packs, ammo boxes) are slowly been phased out as developers explore different ideas to achieve the same result.

C'mon guys back to discussing the mod and the amazing first person to space fighting transition.

I actually don't mind fileplanet since I am in Australia and I don't tend to find queues at the times I download. I'd just like to see mods have as wide and distributed launch as possible and locking down exclusives will limit the number of initial players since some people may not be able to use certain sites for whatever reason. I'm sure people would say the same thing if ModDB went for exclusives too ;)

You can embed flash so you are able to add music and anything you want to your profile provided it is within the sites terms of use. Auto-playing music is discouraged and maybe disabled however if it frustrates the sites visitors

Refused? You seem to reach a lot of conclusions quickly. At the time when you asked the program was already in motion and making major changes would be extremely difficult.

Whilst I agree there is a remake / war theme going on, all of these mods with the exception of JP have permission (as far as I am aware) - and therefore the issue is the lack of creativity.

I dont view this as a bad thing, these mods are all amazing and deserving of our attention, but I agree modding is largely celebrated for its creative ideas and therefore if the community is going to miss these mods, in future we will have to factor this into our plan so they do receive the recognition they deserve.

Why is english ability so important ? I am a firm believer in communicating in whatever means makes sense and is the most efficient.

To a modder the most important thing they do is make mods. I would be disappointed to hear they stress about their english when making the best mod should be their no. 1 concern.

Also arrogance is frustrating, but is there anything wrong with being proud of something you created? I certainly don't think so. Being proud however has to go hand in hand with being able to take criticism and accept mistakes you have made when they are pointed out, so I agree with you there

Mods are meant to be connected with their own development group and not a community group. So if someone linked their mod with this group that is essentially saying you guys are the leaders / developers.

2007 introduces a new rule. You cannot win in the same category twice which means BMS cannot win Unreleased MOTY. They could win in other categories (for example if they released there mod, they would then be eligible for the Mod of the Year category).

Thats because we wrote a script to convert v3 information into the v4 format. However because v4 worked differently, a lot of the information you see on the site will be presented badly at the moment. We will try and fix up old information as best as we can.

Having said this all new content added to the site from here on in will obviously include all of the information you need in the summary + image areas.

• Aiming with all weapons has been fixed
• Fixed Spawn Protection
• Insurgency will now support third-party TK protection systems, and will come with one in the default installation
• All the maps have been revised and tweaked wherever necessary
• Damage system has been improved
• The scoring system should now work properly
• Player viewheight is fixed
• Fixed loading Screen shows map info of LASTMAP instead of NEXTMAP
• Fixed the bug where dead players/bodies could capture objectives
• Fixed spawning inside other players
• Fixed the bug where grenades sometimes didn't make sound after bouncing off objects
• All objectives are now listed in the commander menu
• The M203 will now reload the 3rd grenade properly
• A primed grenade will now explode if you die
• Fixed several reported crashes

Not all is bug-fixing! There's some extra stuff as well:

• New HUD elements that will help you navigate
• Basic overhead map
• Re-Styling and re-skinning throughout the game.
• Commander promotion system
• Fast switching
• You no longer have to hit the forward key before being able to sprint

A full, detailed list of fixes and new content will be released with the upcoming patch.

To be honest that was my immediate reaction. I think online courses are great, but I am still dubious about second life. Still it allows you to do some fairly creative things so it'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

The book covers both the visual and artistic side as well as the gameplay aspect of level design. Don’t expect any technical how-to tutorials in this book, this book is about the "why". Rather than writing yet another tutorial/book about how to create a virtual room this book is about how to make that room look cool and play well. Expect tips and techniques as well as explanations of the logic and reasoning behind art and design decisions. How does the gameplay in a level work? What’s the reason this kind of architecture gives this kind of feeling or looks better in situation A or B? Why does this color combination work so well? What kind of floorplan can I best use to improve gameplay and why? What type of sound setup should I use?

It targets the mod communities of action games such as the HL,UT and Quake communities and it aims to help them with the gameplay and visual design of their levels/virtual worlds. The book will go on sale in a printed and digital PDF edition and is entirely self published and thus only available online.
More info can be found on Book.Hourences.com

The author is a Dutch/Belgian level designer, active both in the mod community as professionally in the games industry. He started around 1999/2000 and since then he has made dozens of free levels for the mod communities, worked on various of well known mods and worked for a range of game studios on several gametitles including Epic Games, Guerrilla Games, Digital Extremes, Khaeon Games, and so on. For Epic Games he has worked on UT2004 for which he made a number of levels including the two very popular demo levels DM Rankin and ONS Torlan. More details can be found on his portfolio site ( Portfolio.hourences.com )

The book is entirely self funded and published and is not yet released, this is merely the announcement.

As I read this news article, i thought this is professional 'hoak' standard and did he dissapoint, no!!! Fantastic looking mod, good to see it on a different game engine too, which really is underutilised :D

That is awesome, though you never actually see the flashbang canister? I presume that is deliberate in this demo vid. Oh and I love how the closer you get the more it really effects your vision., Video aint that clear but then again what can you fit into 3 megs. Awesome stuff :thumbup:

I got to say, this mod really does look something special.. even the website is themed perfectly to the mod. Keep up the fine work and I'll be certain to modWatch it so I can catch any and all of the latest happenings

just wanted to welcome your mod and say you have some top notch models on show on your mods webpage. Great stuff, just be good to be able to see a few map images and stuff though. Apart from that :thumbup:

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i prolly should clear this up.. as it is a little confusing.. you see the sig you set is used in both the commenting and forum system... however i strongly doubt mod leaders wanna see massive sig images in their profile hense they are not shown there. however in the forum any images you add to your sig will be shown.. i will add an explaination about that in a moment :)

Damn that is one PHAT custom modDB logo great job. Anyhow after seeing the logo I thought, why not check out the mod, and well it is released and looking great. Damn shame your host is down otherwise i'd have this puppy queued on my download list. Looks like great fun! :o

how can you quite possibly hate this mod... must be a competitor or something of that nature.

ever since it first registered at modDB and I saw the amount of effort that has obviously gone in..

I mean i am impressed by anything original as making models is onething but creating something different is something else and this mod achieves that brilliantly by dishing up both air and ground warfare to furiously paced serious sam game engine... it is certain to be a winner!